This is the fourth in a series of blogs by the Marquette University men's and women's cross country teams chronicling the 2011 season. GoMarquette.com catches up with men's junior Jack Hackett after the Greater Louisville Classic.

We took a mostly full, healthy crew (finally) down to Louisville last weekend for the Greater Louisville classic.

The majority of the time on this trip was spent on the bus, so I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the 14 hours we spent on it. The boys took the back of the bus and the women the front. On the way out most people were able to sleep, but some people like Evan Ross had to resort to some pretty strange positions to try and get some rest. He was curled up under, and around the seat in front of him on the floor.

Hours upon hours of movies provided entertainment.

Eventually we did make it to E.P. “Tom” Sawyer Park to run the course, and the girls and guys split up and previewed our conference course. Everyone decided it was going to be a pretty fast course the next day, and the excitement started to grow.

For dinner we got to go to Buca de Beppo, and had an awesome co-ed meal, consisting of salad, pasta, and a lot of bread.

Race day morning we got up at 5:30 a.m. Central time to get in a few miles to shakeout. Half asleep we returned from that and got a light breakfast in.

The guy’s race was crazy with so many teams and so little space. After about 200 meters the course bottlenecks and people right next to a Marquette pack went down and I had to hurdle someone.

Our guys continued to race smart and we all individually ran well. Blake Johnson continued his impressive season placing in the top 25 and Peter had an impressive PR to finish second for us.

We had a very strong pack not to far off of that coming in right around 25 minutes. Eleven of the 14 guys that raced had personal-best times. Many of those performances are due in great part to the women’s soccer team, which came out and was the best cheering section a cross country meet has ever seen.

The sea of their dark grey jackets grew so loud at the sight of a Marquette runner that it would send chills and a shot of adrenaline to us. Both the men and women can’t thank them enough, they were awesome!

Overall the trip was a huge success, the teams are starting to get to the important part of the season, and we are proving we are in shape and up for the challenge. The goal this weekend was to compete tough and to have a test run for BIG EAST in a month, and I would say we met those goals.